


Lock It Away, In the Smallest Cupboard, Under the Longest Stairs and Turn Out All The Lights

by Lesbianna



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Angst, Drarry, Fluff, Fluffy Ending, HP: EWE, Inspired by a comic, M/M, Not Epilogue Compliant, Post-Battle of Hogwarts, Queer Relationships, Rita Skeeter wrote Harry Potter, Skeeter writes the HP books after the final battle, but also fluff?, minor character deaths (from canon), slytherin friendships
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-23
Updated: 2017-12-23
Packaged: 2019-02-19 01:39:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,578
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13113216
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lesbianna/pseuds/Lesbianna
Summary: The story of Harry Potter had taken the world by storm, and barely anyone seemed to care that the man behind the story still had nightmares at night – Draco mopped his sweaty forehead with a damp washcloth and listened to him talking of things worse than Dark Lords; of small cupboards and dark, endless nights and of having his drawings ripped and his heart broken with the endless hate for him, and privately thought that it didn’t matter where Potter was, he’d always be locked in that cupboard; he’d fulfilled his usefulness to the wizards, and he had been thrown into the dark cupboard again, just as his aunt and uncle used to do when they had no use for him anymore.Draco could live like this, side by side with Potter who slowly turned into Harry, could fool himself into believing it was love, but he knew he’d always be standing a breath away from what he truly wanted. And the years passed, and Draco could never figure out how to breathe around Potter so he could get what he needed.--Rita Skeeter wants to write Harry Potter's biography.





	Lock It Away, In the Smallest Cupboard, Under the Longest Stairs and Turn Out All The Lights

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Five Facts About Potter](https://archiveofourown.org/external_works/346458) by Skarhead. 



 

It was the end of the war, and Draco Malfoy’s wounds and bruises were closing and healing by themselves, slowly and over many days and weeks, because his mother did not know healing magic particularly well (she was too scared she’d hurt him, she was too gentle and fussed over him far too much, but it was okay, he could understand it, and he loved her so much it for it that it physically hurt) and his father had even less of a proclivity for healing magic. The people of Hogwarts had not wanted to use as much as a single drop of Dittany of them, a single wave of their wands, and he could understand that too, they were more concerned with their loved ones. Greg had been silently crying on his shoulder, as though in final understanding that Vincent was dead, or maybe that the whole world was dead, and as days turned into weeks after the Final Battle, his eyes stopped being full of brimming tears, and instead just full of despair.

They all stayed at Hogwarts, every single student who had fought, every single teacher, to build up the walls again, to create happiness, somehow. Draco thought it was bollocks; he wanted to leave this place forever, yet he couldn’t help the intense need to build it back up, to use up every ounce of magic inside him every day, make his body ache so he could forget that his father was being sentenced to Azkaban, which would surely kill him, make him forget his mother’s pale face and cold hands. He just needed to build up Hogwarts again, just until the ministry figured out what to do with him, the pathetic death eater who had never wanted to be a death eater.

It was only days after the Battle that Rita Skeeter had pounced on Potter, wanting to have the full story of his survival, wanting a full biography. Potter had only snarled at her and left, hand in hand with Ginny Weasley.

No one knew exactly how it had come about that Hermione Granger, of all people, supported the writing of a book. All anyone knew, was the loud negotiations that had been had in a hidden corridor – Granger had evidently forgotten to place silencing charms over the place.

The book was to be written as a work of fiction. Or, more accurately, the _book series_ was to be written as a work of fiction. It was even to be sold to muggles. Lovegood had suggested it, and Granger had latched onto it with bright-eyed desperation, comparing racism to blood-purity and talking about stopping wars. Draco had felt like vomiting upon hearing that. As though a book about a world the muggles didn’t even believe in, could stop wars.

Potter met up with Skeeter several times a week to discuss his first year, and Granger had supplied Veritaserum for every meeting, making the Ravenclaws discuss how they’d be getting a _truthful account_ of the story.

The first book was written very quickly, and published in both the magical and muggle community before long.

Draco bought it, because of course he did. They all did. Everyone owned that book. He did suspect, though, that the reasoning he had, was not the same as the one his fellow wizards had. Having some part of Harry Potter with him was better than none, even if it was a less twisted and broken version. (He was so messed up.)

The Gryffindors all thought the story of Harry Potter was one filled with hope. Draco knew better. It was filled with despair and hatred and tragedy, and he did not care for children learning that love meant sacrificing yourself. But he couldn’t stop himself from turning the pages with greed; all he wanted was to be that kid again, the one who could walk with the Malfoy swagger, the one who had complained to all his friends about “Potter the Prat” endlessly, until the age of thirteen, when Pansy and Blaise had finally sat him down and told him that it wasn’t normal to look at your nemesis like that, let alone devote so much time to them. Blaise had informed him that he was a raging homosexual.

(He hadn’t listened. It had taken Harry being attacked by a dragon at fourteen for Draco to finally agree with his friends that, fine, he was into Potter. Greg had asked if that meant he’d stop moaning about Potter at night too, or if he’d have too keep up with silencing charms, and Vincent had asked if someone would help him learn that spell too. They’d laughed all night about that. God. They had been so young.)

So, sue him, if he wanted to be that boy again. He’d been insufferable, sure. But he’d just been a kid, innocent and happy. So sure of everything he was and everything he’d become.

Draco drifted in uncertainty. So did Potter, and it was so predictable, because Draco _knew_ Potter. Potter would flit from office to office for years and years, and he'd always be good at his work, but never happy. The frown lines in his face were already deep, and the scars on his body even more so.

Draco was sentenced to stay in Britain for ten years after the war; he wouldn’t be able to leave the country until he was twenty-eight. He had been _allowed_ to live in a ministry-approved apartment, with his books and his magic and his knowledge that the war might be over but that little kids who were prats to an eleven-year-old Harry Potter were never redeemed in the Ministry’s eyes.

But Harry Potter – Harry Potter could have gone any-fucking-where in the fucking world. He had just chosen not to, because he wanted to be _ordinary_.

The ministry also sentenced him to help Rita Skeeter write the remaining six books when she announced the need for an assistant due to the unexpected success of the book with the muggles; it wasn't so much a nicely asked question as an announcement that he'd be helping Rita Skeeter. It was supposed to help his 'anti-muggle-policies'. Besides, as Skeeter said, it would be good to have someone who hadn't been Potter's friend in school to say their piece too.

(She just loved the drama of it, he suspected, and he refused to give her any, so he had just complied instead of finding something else that would 'help his anti-muggle policies'.) 

But he still hated it. Hated it because it meant leaving his apartment for Skeeter’s office and because it meant giving Potter two drops of Veritaserium every Tuesday, and hear him talk of snakes speaking to him through the walls, and Polyjuice potions and sneaking into the Slytherin common room. He hated it because Skeeter wrote for hours on her muggle typewriter, endless _click-click-click_ that was supposed to contain all of Potter’s life. He hated it, because Potter’s green-green-green eyes went dull as he drank the truth serum and spoke, and because Potter was reliving every single bad moment of his life and Draco was supposed to just write it down and wrap it up with a bow because the world had been _saved_.

But Potter wasn’t hostile to him, at least, and Potter even smiled at him after a few months. (Draco hated his stuttering heart, his hopeless hope that that meant something, and he had to conclude that nothing had really changed from when he was thirteen.)

Sometimes, he and Potter would sit and talk before Rita came in, first just polite conversation, and then somehow, they would talk for longer and longer, and Potter would arrive earlier or stay later.

When he had lost the keys to his flat – he was suspecting that the ministry had made him Shrinking Keys, just for the laugh of it – Potter had invited him to stay over. And Draco had, because he was weak.

And they went to muggle London and saw the strange moving pictures, and they went through Diagon Alley to buy Potter proper clothes, and Potter was so alive and yet not. And then they went home to Potter’s house and slept in separate beds and Draco didn’t ask why Ginny Weasley didn’t live there, and Draco was always awoken by Potter’s screams and his sobs.

The story of Harry Potter had taken the world by storm, and barely anyone seemed to care that the man behind the story still had nightmares at night – Draco mopped his sweaty forehead with a damp washcloth and listened to him talking of things worse than Dark Lords; of small cupboards and dark, endless nights and of having his drawings ripped and his heart broken with the endless hate for him, and privately thought that it didn’t matter where Potter was, he’d always be locked in that cupboard; he’d fulfilled his usefulness to the wizards, and he had been thrown into the dark cupboard again, just as his aunt and uncle used to do when they had no use for him anymore.

Draco could live like this, side by side with Potter who slowly turned into Harry, could fool himself into believing it was love, but he knew he’d always be standing a breath away from what he truly wanted. And the years passed, and Draco could never figure out how to breathe around Potter so he could get what he needed.

Pansy Parkinson got engaged to Daphne Greengrass, and Granger and Weasley married each other in an abandoned muggle church, in the pouring rain. Teddy Lupin ran around with his hair flickering in all the colors of the rainbow and Andromeda Black and Narcissa Malfoy clasped hands for the first time in decades.

The publishing of the last book was coming up, and it had almost been ten years since the Battle of Hogwarts. Draco felt restless; what he and Skeeter and Harry had worked on for years would be coming to an end soon, and he still didn’t know what he would be doing. He was a marked Death Eater, and though he had never wanted to be, that wouldn’t matter. He’d walk through Diagon Alley and see the broken Weasley brother working tirelessly to keep his twin brother in the costumer’s memories, using old ideas they’d written as children for new products, and wondered if his imprint on this world would forever be an ‘almost’.

In the streets, muggles were dressing up as wizards and witches, and wizards and witches were slipping in and out of the crowds, careful to never seem like they truly were magical, and Draco wanted it to end. He wanted people to stop looking at Harry and say that he was a legend. Legends shouldn’t still be alive. Legends don’t break your heart, because they’re always long gone.

When there were only weeks until the final book would be delivered to the publishers – both muggle and magical – Skeeter was mostly just making sure the writing was clean, and questioning Harry on _how_ important _The Life and Lies of Albus Dumbledore_ had been in the final battle. She didn’t want to think about the many deaths she’d had to describe, Draco figured, and he couldn’t fault her. Draco was mostly just wanting to spend every moment with Harry, because he was pathetically needy, because the reiterations of all the dead was taking its toll on the both of them, and he wanted to crawl into Harry’s bed and curl close.

When Harry one Tuesday told Draco that he couldn’t stay over because the Weasleys were coming over, he knew what that meant. He knew Harry was going to pretend that he had closure with the war and that he was going to carve himself a place in the Weasley family tree with a woman that looked like his dead mother. What did it matter that Tuesdays had been his and Harry’s sacred day for years and years? What did it matter?

He stayed late at Skeeter’s office that day, cleaning it again and again, looking through the papers of the book until he knew it from beginning to end, and then, he sat down in Skeeter’s chair, in front of her infernal writing device.

With angry, clawed hands, he typed on Rita Skeeter’s machine, that Harry Potter married Ginny Weasley and had three children whom he named after dead people, that Harry Potter would always live his life with mediocrity, and would always disguise it as happiness and a normal life. That Harry Potter would meet up with Hermione Granger and Ronald Weasley to send off his kids with Hogwarts, and lament his time at Hogwarts, as though he could never find happiness as he had found it there. _Click-click-click._

He wrote himself into it, standing next to a woman he’d have married because of his persistent feelings of responsibility, and saying goodbye to his son who Weasley would be warning his daughter to stay away from. He wrote the cordial nod he and Potter would be exchanging, the distance between them endless. And he knew that that’s what it would be like. He knew that no matter what his hopes were for those green eyes and the endless dreams and the well of love inside him, it didn’t matter one ounce.

Being friends or friendly or whatever they were – it didn’t matter, because Harry Potter would always remain within his cupboard, he’d curl himself up and let his thin limbs cut into his soft skin and his beating heart. That was the only way the tragedy of Harry Potter could end.

He duplicated the pages and put them in the back of both the manuscripts, and let them fuse with the rest of the story.

He stared at the books for a few seconds, one with a moving picture of Harry after the battle, standing in the ruins of the castle, and one with a muggle drawing of Harry Potter.

Each of them would be sent to companies and then out into the world, carrying the word of how Harry Potter had become the master of Death…

A knock startled him from his thoughts, and the green-eyed man from the books stepped into the room, saying Draco’s name like a prayer, and Draco stepped forwards and they were so close, and Draco was a breath away from getting everything he’d ever wanted…

Harry spoke, and his words were the only thing in the universe.

“I’ve been thinking, I’m the Boy Who Lived, the Chosen One. And I’m probably going to keep living in my nightmares, if I don’t change. But I’ve been thinking that I want to…”

Harry grabbed Draco’s left arm, and touched the spot of the Dark Mark. “I want us to just forget our legacies and just go. In just a few weeks, you’re free to go anywhere. Go with me.” He stopped for a moment, and smiled. “Oh, I forgot to ask – would you be willing to go out on a date?”

Draco huffed and nodded and smiled slightly and wondered if Harry had thought the same things as he had all along, and he wondered if he should rip those awful words out of the books. But maybe it was better if some remnant of what could have been was out there, to scare people off mediocrity.

“Let’s go.”

And the way Harry smiled at him then, was anything but mediocre.

Draco breathed him in.

**Author's Note:**

> Note that I dealt with the issue of publication dates (the first book was published in 1997, which is before the final battle in May 1998) by assuming that the magical world does not use the same system as the muggle world, since the birth of Jesus (and Christianity) hardly had any positive impact on the magical community. Instead, I decided that they would, in my story, be counting from the latest witch burning in the British Isles (1727) which in the year1997 makes 270 years of safety.
> 
> Since Rita would be translating dates to the muggle type, she would likely mess up a few times. AKA; the Battle of Hogwarts was actually in ’97 (in muggle years).
> 
> This is not mentioned in the actual story, but I know that it’d be itching inside you if I didn’t clarify.


End file.
